


Where The Love-Light Gleams

by psalmoflife



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Christmas, Feelstide 2012, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Minor Violence, Rated for language and violence, get-together, mentions of domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-21 04:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psalmoflife/pseuds/psalmoflife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton's Christmas mornings have been a collection of adventures strung together as he moves through life. After he and Phil move into the Tower, he might get his chance at having a normal Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where The Love-Light Gleams

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Feelstide 2012, prompt 11: waking up snuggled up to someone on a Christmas morning for the first time. I think it was maybe just intended as their first Christmas together (which it is), but I also wrote it as Clint's first Christmas with anybody else. 
> 
> Some of Clint's Christmases involve time in the Army. I am not a soldier and have extremely limited familiarity with the places and languages mentioned. However, the details aren't particularly important for this story, so don't worry if you don't, either.
> 
> The year of the prompt is in present tense, everything else is in past. 
> 
> Rated for language, some mild violence, and references to Clint's father being abusive/alcoholic. Title is from "I'll Be Home For Christmas."

When Clint wakes up, he isn't sure where he is.

He's just coming off a mission and had spent most of Christmas Eve debriefing with Fury and Hill. This is his first night back in the Tower, and between his time away and the nightmares from the mission, his subconscious thinks he's supposed to be holed up in a cave in the Urals.

Instead, he's curled up on his side in an enormous, fluffy bed. He can smell cinnamon and coffee and pine needles. There's a warm bulk at his back, a heavy arm over his waist that pulls him tighter when he tries to move.

It's Christmas, and he's home.

**\---**

When he was little, Clint got used to spending Christmas Eve under the bed.

Screaming fights weren't exactly unusual in his house, but they always seemed to be worse around the holidays, and inevitably his father would pitch a fit when he saw how many presents were under the tree. It didn't seem to matter that Daddy spent so much of their money on booze and gambling, the fact that his mother had scraped up enough money to provide more than one gift each for Clint and Barney always meant yelling. 

Clint didn't like to be alone when he was scared, but mommy was out in the living room and Barney said that he was too big to share a bed with his brother, so Clint crawled underneath his bed with his stuffed penguin and his blanket. 

For three consecutive years, Barney danced impatiently in the living room on Christmas morning, because their mom wouldn't start presents without Clint, and no one knew where he was.

\---

The orphanage was both better and worse.

It was better because there was no screaming to keep him awake on Christmas Eve, even though it was almost too quiet because Clint was just old enough to bunk with the big boys and they all snuck out to steal the cookies left for Santa.

It was worse because Mommy’s gone, and that meant gifts that weren't really Clint’s. He knew he should be grateful for what he had, but Mommy had always taken the time to go over his list and figure out a way to get him something he really wanted, even if it meant buying second-hand or picking up extra hours at work. All the toys at the orphanage were donated by people in the community, and since everyone loved the little kids the best they wound up with tons of crayons and plush animals, but nothing appropriate for the older kids. 

They always had to go to church on Christmas Eve, and then before bed they would get the standard lecture about how fortunate they were just to have a roof and some food. Later, Clint will look back and know that the nuns were right, but at ten he just wanted one gift under the tree that someone had taken the time to pick out especially for him.

\---

The circus was kind of a shitshow.

Usually for Christmas they were somewhere in the south, because the trailers didn’t really have heat or reliable electricity, so being somewhere that stayed warm and had relatively longer days was kind of an important survival mechanism.

(One memorable year, they crossed the border into Mexico. The Mexican border guards had let them through just fine, but when they tried to cross back into El Paso they found out that they were missing some key paperwork, including documentation on half the animals and passports for Clint and Barney. Clint wound up trekking through the desert with a chimp named Bella. The knowledge he gained on this trip became imperative on a SHIELD mission where he had to get Stark from St. Petersburg to Odessa without anyone noticing.) 

Christmas in the circus sort of sucked. No one ever wanted to go to the circus at Christmas-time, because they were too busy being with their families and shit, so by the time the actual day rolled around they had usually exhausted their savings and were subsisting on ramen noodles and fruit they stole from the chimp cages. 

(After a while, Bella started bringing Clint her apples. He wasn't sure if that was hilarious or pathetic.) 

For the first two years they were with the show, Clint and Barney didn't have their own official quarters. They really weren't even employed by the circus, but they made themselves useful doing odd jobs around the tents and pickpocketing rubes at the sideshows, so someone was usually willing to give them space. Clint’s first Christmas in the circus, he woke up wedged underneath a table in the strong man’s trailer, arm asleep from the way he’d had to contort himself. His second year, he wasn't so lucky, and he had to spend the night curled up on some straw next to the chimp cages, with only Bella and Maurice for company. He had long, one-sided conversations with the chimps about what he was going to do after the circus, mostly going back to Waverly and buying his old house and finding the stuff they’d had to leave at the orphanage when they ran, and sometimes he could convince himself that it might actually happen. 

In between Clint’s second and third Christmas with the circus, he became valuable enough to warrant some space in an old trailer. He did trick shots in the big top during the day and kept himself out of the way at night, learning quickly that he didn't want to be around the adults after the whiskey came out. He spent most nights curled up under his blanket promising to himself that he’d never, ever drink whiskey. 

Barney fell in love in the circus, with an acrobat named Giselle. Shortly after Clint started getting all the attention he unofficially moved in to her bunk, despite the space Clint secured for both of them. Clint wasn't sure what he’d done to upset his brother so much, but he was sure it was his fault, so he spent the next four Christmases trying to think of ways to make Barney come back to him. Instead of coming back, Barney cycled through most of the young women on the show- after Giselle, there was Lizzie the equestrian, then Sarah the popcorn girl, then Maria the contortionist. 

Trickshot tried to set Clint up with someone on occasion, but decided that Clint was a late bloomer when none of the girls took. Instead of a warm body, Clint cuddled up to an extra pillow, feeling like a baby for wishing that he still had his penguin.

\---

Clint enlisted in the army for lack of a better idea.

He left the circus under less than ideal conditions. Since he was only seventeen when he ran off after a near-fatal disagreement with the Swordsman, he was able to get onto Child Protective Service's radar. They couldn't do much for him, them being rather swamped and him being nearly 18, but an enterprising young social worker tracked down all his documentation and helped him cram for a GED. 

After he turned 18 and had to leave the shelter, he spent some time bouncing around between rented rooms and hotels. He picked up a couple of retail jobs and mostly succeeded at being polite to the yuppies who came into the stores searching for yet another expensive gift for their kids. 

Unfortunately people in in that particular town were regular Martha Stewarts and did all their shopping early, so the week before Christmas his hours dried up. Clint spent his first Christmas as an adult curled up behind a dumpster in an alleyway, followed by sneaking over to the country club to raid their trash bins after their holiday brunch. 

He didn't really want to be a soldier, but he _really_ didn't want to be homeless- so he signed on the dotted line.

\---

Clint spent his next five Christmases in various stages of FUBAR.

The drill sergeants in basic figured out pretty quickly that he had some extra talents, so he was tapped for Ranger school and just about every kind of special forces training program they could get him into. He became an even more effective assassin than he’d been already, augmenting his acrobatics, stealth, and skill with a bow with hand-to-hand, explosives, and just about every firearm in existence. 

He spent two years embedded in and around Islamabad, existing as a ghost while tracking the whereabouts of various Pakistani nuclear weapons components, which the CIA worried were being sold to outside bidders. 

After 9/11 he was pulled to provide support to an Army unit in Afghanistan, with the expectation that his Pashto was good enough to get in good with the locals. (He tried to tell them that he’d mostly used Urdu in Pakistan, and that the locals in that particular area spoke Dari, but was informed that such concerns were well above his pay grade.) After so long on his own, preceded by an emotionally stunted childhood, he had a hard time fitting in with the rest of the guys in his unit. They all liked each other okay, but they didn't really talk to him unless they were on an op.

Clint spent three years on the increasingly futile objective of converting the villages near their camp to western-style democracy. Every year at Christmas, the guys would all get extra packages with shipping-friendly goodies and take turns using the SAT-phones to call home as often as possible. Clint didn't have anyone he wanted to call, and certainly not anyone that would send him a package, so he mostly spent Decembers playing soccer with the local kids and deflecting questions.

\---

He met Phil Coulson after most of the rest of his unit got blown up by an IED.

Clint suffered a concussion in the blast and didn't remember the 48 hours leading up to the mission, but apparently he’d noticed the distinct lack of children and some ground that looked funny and managed to get the guys nearest him behind the closest building. 

Coulson told him that the army wasn't quite sure what to do with him, but were thinking of sending him back to school to learn French so he could run around some jungles in Africa, and was he interested in speaking English for a while? 

“I don’t know what I want,” Clint finally said. 

Coulson gave him a long, considering look. “You’ll be perfect.”

\---

Clint wasn't exactly perfect with SHIELD, nor was he entirely happy, but overall he thought it was a step up from the Army. He had private quarters and even had some control over what missions he went on. He got a reputation for being mouthy after calling Sitwell a ‘close-minded obstructionist’ and ‘fucking moron’ on an open comm when the handler wouldn't let him adjust a mission plan on the fly, but Coulson examined the security tapes, declared that Clint had been right, and promoted him.

(He also got a reputation for being Coulson’s favorite, but he didn't mind that particular rumor.) 

Christmases with SHIELD were any other day. As Fury put it, “those motherfuckers don’t stop trying to end the world just because civilized people are busy spending shitloads of money.” Unless he was on a mission near a church or decorated city plaza, he usually wasn't aware of the holiday- the only exception was the year he was actually on base for Christmas, and somehow got conned by Natasha into entering the gingerbread house contest with her. Coulson laughed for ten minutes when they won, then wouldn't speak to them for two weeks when they volunteered him to eat the thing.

\---

One year, everything changed. 

Coulson still had a family. Not one of his own, but his parents and two sisters and an assortment of nieces and nephews that all got together every year for the holidays. Coulson usually couldn't go, obviously, but senior staff rotated years to get Christmas week off. Coulson was really excited about spending Christmas with his family for the first time in six years, and Clint had gotten caught up in his joy, helping him pick out toys and think up cover stories for the handful of visible scars he had collected in the interim. 

Then Budapest happened.

It was supposed to be a quick, in-and-out sort of mission, which was why they took it. Natasha was on her way state-side from an extended mission in Moscow, so Clint and Coulson flew to meet her. Coulson was going to go straight to Portland after, and Clint was thinking of going to Italy, just because he’d never been. 

They didn't know that SHIELD had been infiltrated by an undercover AIM agent until it was too late to turn back, and by then Coulson was bleeding out, abdominal cavity held together by Clint’s sweatshirt and force of will. 

Natasha, being Natasha, managed to complete the mission on her own, including capturing three AIM cell members to interrogate later. For the first time Clint disobeyed a direct order from Coulson, hauling him to the extraction point instead of leaving him to die. 

Clint spent Christmas Eve curled up in the ceiling vents above Coulson’s bed. Sitwell had somehow gotten Fury to agree to put Coulson in a regular hospital so that his family could come visit, on the pretense of helping him recover from an interrupted break-in at his apartment. Since Clint wasn't family he wasn't on the hospital’s visiting list. He could have broken into the room, but he had no idea how he would explain his presence to Coulson’s family. Plus, Coulson had been put in a medically induced coma while they put his organs back in the correct places, and hadn't woken up yet.

On New Year’s Eve, Coulson woke up. 

Being a secret drama queen, he managed to wake up during visiting hours, so Clint got to feel like an asshole, watching Coulson’s mom cry onto his dad’s shoulder while his nieces and nephews bounced around like a bunch of deranged monkeys.

After normal visiting hours were over, Fury swung by. Clint thought for a moment that he was going to find out some top-secret SHIELD information, but they just talked about college basketball for ten minutes before Fury went back to base.

Clint was trying to figure out if the basketball talk was a code for something when Coulson suddenly went still, then sighed.

“Barton, get down here.” 

Sheepishly, Clint pushed the grating aside and fell down to the floor of Coulson’s room. “Evening, sir.” 

Coulson’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you ‘sir’ me, Barton, I’m still writing you up for insubordination. And I’m assigning you to a new handler. How do you feel about Sitwell?” 

Clint spluttered for a moment, feeling more abandoned than he had since his mom died. “What- you don’t want me anymore?” 

Coulson gave another long-suffering sigh. “Come here, you idiot.”

Clint didn't know what he was expecting in that moment, but Coulson yanking him down by the front of his shirt to plant a kiss on his lips had not even crossed his mind.

\---

Their first year together had been rough. 

Phil tried to follow through on Clint’s reassignment, citing SHIELD’s non-existent fraternization regulations, but Fury refused to sign off on it.

“I am not about to spend half of my life playing therapist to handlers that can’t deal with your boyfriend,” Fury’d snapped. 

They’d sort of fallen into a rhythm, (mostly) keeping it professional on missions, when Clint got pulled to provide surveillance to Dr. Selvig.

\---

When Phil woke up in the med bay three weeks after the invasion, Clint was curled up in a chair next to his bed. Being Clint, he woke up as soon as Phil shifted, looking for a clock. 

(Neither of them would ever, ever admit to doing the stereotypical, foreheads-pressed-together-and-crying thing. Nope.)

After Phil was examined by the doctors and after Clint stopped kissing him for more than thirty seconds, he took a look around the room, at the sleeping bag on the floor and duffel next to the bathroom, and asked “Have you been home?”

Clint shrugged. “Once, for a couple of minutes. It didn't feel right without you.” 

\---

Phil’d had major reservations about moving into the Tower. He liked his privacy, dammit, and he’d also been hoping to avoid being responsible for Tony Stark. But Clint was excited, even if he wouldn't admit it. For the first time since he was six he had some semblance of family, and Tony had just offered him a home that wasn't an orphanage or a trailer or barracks. 

When Christmas time rolled around they did plenty of things together as a team, but Pepper insisted on each of the respective couples doing Christmas morning on their own.

**\---**

When Clint wakes up, he isn't sure where he is. 

Once he figures out that he’s in his bed in the Tower with Phil, he can’t figure out why he can smell breakfast even though Phil is still in bed with him.

“The wonders of JARVIS,” Phil mumbles into the back of his neck. “Got everything set up last night, then had JARVIS turn everything on this morning.”

“It’s weird that you can read my mind,” Clint decides. He squirms until Phil loosens his grip enough that he can roll over. “Merry Christmas.” 

Phil leans forward, giving him a morning breath kiss. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart.” 

Clint’s kind of hoping for some sex as his first Christmas gift, but Phil pulls away, ignoring Clint’s whine. “I’m going to grab breakfast,” Phil says, calm as always. “You can stay here if you want. I’ll leave the door open so you can see the tree.” 

Clint sticks out his lower lip. “But I’ll be lonely without you.”

Phil walks to the door anyway, going to rummage around under the tree until he comes up with a package. “Here’s something to keep you company,” he calls, pitching it into their room to land on the bed. 

Clint reaches for the box, tearing into the wrapping paper. When he finally pulls the lid of the box off, he’s shocked to find a stuffed penguin inside. But it’s not new- the stomach is a dirty, off-white color and one of the eyes is missing. Clint pulls it out of the box with shaking hands to look at the initials on the tag- C.B. 

Clint thinks he might be crying when Phil comes back, but he’s too confused to be sure. “How- how did you-”

“I was on a mission in Nebraska a few months ago. I figured I’d swing by your hometown, see if I could find some pictures or something. The nuns apparently thought throwing your stuff away would be bad luck, so they held onto it for all these years. The rest of it’s in the closet.” Phil’s hand comes to gently rest on Clint’s knee. “I hope you don’t mind, but I know you don’t have much from back then, and-”

“It’s perfect,” Clint interrupts. “God, everything I have for you just seems stupid now. Nothing can top this.” 

\---

They sit side-by-side against the headboard, the penguin in the crook of Clint’s arm, while they have cinnamon rolls and coffee, which Phil claims is his traditional Christmas breakfast. 

After a while they’ll go out to the living room and open the rest of their (anti-climactic, Clint insists) gifts. Eventually they’ll have to meet everyone else for lunch. 

But for now, Clint’s more than pleased to spend his first real Christmas morning with the unexpected love of his life, listening to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and watching the snow come down.


End file.
